Sexual Intelligence: The Religious Right’s Continuing Obsession with Sex
Presidential candidates are being asked to sign “The Marriage Vow,” which opposes same-sex marriage, divorce, and pornography. What will this mean for you?
Polls across the U.S. show that Americans see the economy as their biggest concern. And with support for same-sex marriage and non-marital sexual options at an all-time high, Americans clearly want to be left alone in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Nevertheless, as next month’s GOP straw poll in Iowa draws ever closer, Republican presidential candidates are being urged to sign “The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage & Family.”
The Pledge is a bizarre combination of 1950s sexual conservatism and Cold War-style doomsday-ism (it opposes “infanticide” and the “enslavement” of military wives), which it blends into an obsession with marriage and morality. It claims, with an absolutely straight face, that “candidates’ positions on core values, such as marriage, correlate directly to their moral stances on energy issues, sound budgeting, national defense, and economic policies.”
Apparently, these people either don’t realize that President George W. Bush was a devout Christian, or they didn’t notice that he personally directed the rape of America’s environment, destruction of its budget surplus, or invasion of a country that posed no threat to us whatsoever.
And while we’re at it, let’s remember that Richard Nixon was a devoted husband and father who lied to America so profoundly that he actually had to quit office. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was a divorced man with a colorful past who was conservative to his core. FDR ran around on Eleanor, and rescued America during the depression. Anyone really prefer Hoover?
It’s time someone stood up and said the obvious: a President’s relationship to his wife, his kids, and his dog are no predictor of his fitness for office. Ditto for a female President.
In addition to its garden-variety opposition to same-gender marriage, candidates signing the Marriage Pledge also:
- acknowledge that “robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to the U.S.”
- recognize a category called “stolen innocence,” which includes “seduction into promiscuity” and “all forms of pornography”—which must be opposed
- realize the statistical evidence that “married people enjoy better sex”
This last bit of junk science goes hand-in-glove with the “science” of creationism.
Interestingly, the 14-point Marriage Pledge doesn’t demand that candidates be held responsible for keeping their political promises. It just makes the wild assumption that people who support monogamy and oppose contraception are more likely to do so. Putting aside the illogic of this, don’t these people read the papers, which continually announce the sexual transgressions of the professedly moral?
Instead of grilling candidates on how they will keep predatory, irresistible gay soldiers from seducing, bullying, or depressing our weak, defenseless heterosexual soldiers, I’d prefer a pledge requiring candidates to:
- respect the separation of church and state, which includes a commitment to ending special tax benefits for religious institutions
- remove government interference in sexual relationships between two consenting adults
- commit to science-based public policy in all matters, including sex education, reproductive matters, and the alleged effects of non-traditional, commercial, and artistic sexual expression
Let me repeat: those who wish to be U.S. President are being asked to pledge their opposition to contraception, pornography, “easy” divorce, and the separation of Church & state, while affirming their support for heterosexual monogamy. This policy position should be understood by all as radical, rather than “traditional” or somehow “normal.”
Among its many commitments, the Marriage Pledge demands rejection of “anti-women Sharia Islam.” This seems contradictory. After all, with its opposition to contraception, abortion, divorce, pornography, promiscuity, and its demand that religious morality be the basis of political decision-making, it seems that Sharia—minus the headscarves and stoning for adultery—is way too similar to what this Pledge demands.